Wicked Whims

Whispers in the Corn

Written By Amber Callista

Are you sure this is how you want to win your ex-wife back, Hunter?" My best friend Colt gazes at me like I've completely lost my marbles.

"You know how much she loves Halloween. And none of that ex-wife shit. She's still my wife." I narrow my eyes and rest my thumbs on the straps of my overalls, admiring my haunted masterpiece.

My Emmy lives for all the chills and thrills October 31st can bring so to make up for my lack thereof being a good husband, I decorated the yard with all her favorite festive things. A mixture of gourds and pumpkins rest in wicker baskets filled to the brim, and decorative pots full of yellow, orange, and deep red mums dress the front steps of my family's 1950s farmhouse. Along with several of those stupid pumpkin bags, I groaned about filling with leaves.

Emmy likes to travel to this Halloween store about two hours away every August and each year she comes back with a car full of new decorations. This year it was a ten-foot skeleton with radish-red eyes, cloaked in a long black cape like he's in training to be the next grim reaper.

Aside from the overdone amounts of decor, I also staged a thrilling corn maze experience. She had begged me for weeks last year during harvest season to help her create a spooky corn maze through our sixty acres of land. But as she says, I gave her the back seat while my need to till up the land took the front.

Hearing the cattle in the background snaps me out of my trip down shoulda done better lane. "Alright, let's get them hay bales off the rack before the night sets in. Lord knows we gotta feed them heifers before they start bellowing for all of Dakota County to hear." I instruct Colt.

Growing up here in Farmington, Minnesota, the world's fourth-largest state of corn production, I've been raised to take farming life rather seriously. Not just any schmuck can boot scootin 'boogie on in here and do what we do day in and day out.

"You betcha." Colt throws on a pair of gloves while my mind travels back to that agonizing word he used "ex-wife".

I would be lying if I said it didn't make me nauseous ever since Emmy made it a possibility a month ago. I came in the house from doing chores and she started bickering about how unhappy she is and before I knew it I was bunking in the room above our garage. I was angry at first and used my chores as a distraction to shut her out but I've realized this is the pig sty I created. There's only so little a man can do to ever prove a woman wrong.

Pushing the depressing thoughts aside, I assist with the bales and jump on top of the worn-out haywagon. Taking a hold of the jute-colored rope, I toss the bale onto the grass as memories flood my mind recalling how Emmy and I used to love doing this together.

We used to do everything together.

Just two years ago, I was an award-winning high school football coach and my loving wife was and still is the most spectacular English teacher. We would have lunch together and sneak sweet kisses under the shaded tree that housed some of our greatest high school memories, walk hand in hand out to our vehicle after a long day of work. It was like the fireworks constantly went off around us, with no chance of ever dimming.

Throwing the bales faster, my irritation grows thicker. Like a patch of persistent weeds that don't know when to die.

"Hunter..."

Getting lost in my thoughts, I throw them even harder as my feelings explode into fury.

This wasn't at all how forever was supposed to go.

When I asked Emmy to marry me after scoring that game-winning touchdown my senior year of college, I promised her I would always be the man she needed. The man she wanted. Somewhere along the way, I got so wrapped up in my own life that I forgot the keyword in a marriage.